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Operator
Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Qualys third quarter 2023 investor conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during that session, you will need to press star one one on your phone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Blair King. Sir, please go ahead.
Blair King
Thank you, Chris. Good afternoon, and welcome, everyone, to our Qualys' third quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Sumitakar, President and CEO, and Jumi Kammer, CFO. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements that generally relate to future events or future financial or operating performance. Actual results may differ materially from these statements. The factors that could cause results to differ materially are set forth in today's press release and our filings with the SEC, including our latest Form 10-Q and 10-K. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today And we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. The reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. And as a reminder, the press release prepared remarks and investor presentation are all available on the investor relations section of our website. So with that, I'd like to turn the call now over to Sumit.
Chris
Thank you, Blair, and welcome to our third quarter earnings call. In Q3, we continue to deliver strong financial results, reflecting our ongoing commitment to rapid innovation and customer success. We experienced another quarter of steady VMDR adoption, which is now deployed by 54% of our customers worldwide. Key competitive VMDR wins in Q3 include a leading multinational conglomerate, several global financial services, technology, and manufacturing companies, a large government agency, and multiple new and other existing customers, both down market and in the global 2000. Adding to these wins, I will take a moment to share a couple of examples of how our customers and partners are expanding their use of Qualys' capabilities to further consolidate their security stats. On the customer front, a Fortune 100 biotech company was overwhelmed by the number of security tools it deployed and needed a solution to not only provide better security outcomes, but also consume fewer point products, agents, and resources through a unified dashboard. In a mid six-figure booking upsell, this customer who already deployed cybersecurity asset management with external attack surface management and VMDR, expanded its use of VMDR with TrueRisk to over 290,000 assets while adding our web application scanning, patch management, and total cloud CNAP solutions. In doing so, this customer consolidated three competing vendors across on-prem cloud and multi-cloud environments through an organically integrated platform. With our innovative technologies, unmatched platform effect and focus, reducing our focus on reducing risk and friction. This win underscored Qualys' ability to eclipse siloed solutions and advance our leadership in the industry. Specifically highlighting the momentum we're seeing with our TotalCloud CNAP solution in a highly strategic and competitive mid-six-figure booking cross-sell, a Forbes 200 existing VMDR and patch management customer selected TotalCloud to scale their container deployments in over 50,000 assets, monitoring millions of containers' images daily. Through its evaluation of competing cloud security providers, this customer determined that alternative point solutions added complexity to their operations, lacked integration and missed detections, which hindered their ability to assess risk and consolidate the security tools. Today, through a highly scalable natively integrated CNAP solution, the Qualys cloud platform provides complete visibility of this customer's attack surface with advanced AI ML technologies to uniquely detect zero-day malware while prioritizing and remediating risk at scale in real time. Our early wins in cloud and container environments are a testament to the extensibility of the Qualys cloud platform, its unified dashboard, and our adaptive subscription model. Today, we have over 31 million agents already supporting workloads in the cloud. Qualys is well armed with organically integrated total cloud CNAP solution that unifies cloud workload protection, cloud security posture management, CSPM, cloud detection and response, infrastructure as code, and container security. Powered by AI threat detection and insight, Total Cloud was recognized by Kaplinger Cole as a strong technology leader in cloud security, ahead of several competing modern cloud point solutions and next-gen platforms. I'm quite pleased by the early momentum we are experiencing in the market with our Total Cloud and increasingly encouraging customer feedback. Additionally, new customers continue to adopt cybersecurity asset management with external attack surface management and patch management alongside VMDR right out of the gate. We believe this further highlights Qualys' ability to help customers not only detect but also quantify, prioritize, and remediate risk across all environments much faster than alternate siloed solutions. On the partner front, in Q3, we continue to advance our evolving ecosystem with two leading global managed service providers, which also expanded their offerings beyond VMDR to include our cybersecurity asset management and patch management capabilities. These partners have indicated they chose Qualys over competing solutions due to the ease of orchestration, natively integrated platform, and single agent approach to simplify their operations and significantly reduce remediation times for their customers. In addition, we expanded our relationship with another leading cloud provider, which is now taking the Qualys cloud platform available in its marketplace. With wins such as this one, I've shared today customers spending 500,000 or more with us in Q3 grew 15% from a year ago to 174. With more and more customers beginning to perceive Qualys as a leading risk management platform that consolidates multiple security point solutions across all environments, we remain confident in our ability to drive long-term growth and gain market share. especially in light of the recent IDC study highlighting a 403% ROI for customers choosing to partner Qualys with a platform approach. As I have said before, a cornerstone of our strategy is engineering innovation, and with a customer-first, product-led growth focus, we challenge ourselves every day to lead the industry. Executing against this agenda, we will unveil our new platform approach at our upcoming Qualys Security Conference in Orlando from November 6th to November 9th. This new approach will seamlessly integrate any number of third-party security tools into Qualys Cloud Platform. Regardless of the variety of vendors utilized within an organization's infrastructure, Qualys will soon harness automated insights into critical areas of risk spanning on-prem cloud and multi-cloud assets to uniquely enable comprehensive remediation-wise risk posture assessment with new groundbreaking remediation capabilities. At this conference, our product and engineering teams will further showcase additional innovations on the cloud platform, including our advancements in delivering ML and AI-based predictive insights, first-party vulnerability and misconfiguration detection and response, the integration of software supply chain security into continuous integration and delivery, CI-CD pipelines, and more. you can hear our customers speak firsthand about how our continuous innovation on the platform enables organization simultaneously reduce complexity and risk in their environment as they standardize our trusted platform that delivers an immediate ROI and lower total cost of ownership relative to siloed traditional detection only technologies. We have over 900 people registered to attend and look forward to seeing many of you there. In summary, We are delivering strong profitability and cash flow while building business momentum in both our core and cloud expansion markets as companies uniformly recognize security transformation is fundamental to combating today's heightened threat and regulatory environment. As a result, customers are increasingly looking to reduce their risk exposure through the adoption of integrated risk management platforms spanning all environment instead of deploying a collection of disparate point solutions for different environments and hiring more people to manage those. We believe that our organically integrated cloud-native platform built to solve modern security challenges, Qualys is laying a foundation for future growth and well-positioned to drive long-term shareholder value with a balanced approach to growth and profitability. With that, I will turn the call over to Jumi to further discuss our third quarter results and outlook for the fourth quarter and full year 2023.
Blair
Thanks, Sunay, and good afternoon. Before I start, I'd like to note that except for revenues, all financial figures are non-GAAP and growth rates are based on comparison to the prior year period unless stated otherwise. Turning to third quarter results, revenues grew 13% to 142 million with growth from channel partners outpacing direct at 17% versus 10% growth from direct. Channel revenue contribution remained the same as last quarter at 43%. By GEO, growth in the U.S. of 14% was ahead of our international business, which grew 11%. U.S. and international revenue mix remained the same as last quarter at 60% and 40% respectively. In Q3, we started to see some indication of stabilization in the selling environment, with customers confirming their prioritization of security with NIT budgets. but believe ongoing budget scrutiny will linger for the foreseeable future. Reflecting the sentiment, our growth retention rate has remained largely unchanged at approximately 90%, but our net dollar expansion rate came in lower at 106%, down from 108% last quarter. While there continues to remain room for improvement from smaller customers, larger customers spending $25,000 or more with us grew 15%. In terms of new product contribution to bookings, patch management and cybersecurity asset management combined made up 11% of LTM bookings and 19% of LTM new bookings in Q3. In addition, we're pleased to share that we're seeing an increase in interest in our cloud security solution, Total Cloud Synapse. Cloud security solution made up 5% of LTM bookings in Q3, showing return on the acquisition of Total Cloud and Blue Hexagon. Since 2021, we acquired TotalCloud, a cloud workflow management and no-code automation platform, and BlueHexagon, AI ML innovator of cloud threat detection and response solutions to augment our cloud security solution. It's exciting to see our continued innovation and investment in our platform is driving adoption and starting to change the market perception of Qualys as a risk management platform that can help customers consolidate multiple security point solutions. We look forward to serving as a strategic partner to our customers as they evaluate their security vendor consolidation strategy. Now turning to profitability, reflecting our scalable and sustainable business model, adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter of 2023 was $68.8 million, representing a 48% margin compared to a 44% margin a year ago. We roughly maintained our operating expenses in Q3, only up by 2% to 55.1 million. Sales and marketing was up by 9%, same growth as what we saw in Q2. While we delayed some investments in response to the business climate and arrival of our new CRO in July, we achieved greater operational efficiency through focused efforts and optimizing investments. This led to EBITDA margin exceeding our expectations in Q3 and further demonstrates our ability to maintain high operating leverage remain capital efficient while continuing to innovate and invest in our long-term growth initiative. With a strong performance, EPS for the third quarter of 2023 was 1.51, which came in higher than expected, partly due to the change in our tax estimates. In Q3, we recorded 16% tax rate, but if the tax rate had remained unchanged at 24%, EPS would have been 1.37. Our tax rate guidance for both Q4 and full year 2023 is 21%. Our free cash flow for the third quarter of 2023 was $90.6 million, representing a 64% margin in the quarter and 50% year-to-date. In Q3, we continued to invest the cash we generated from operations back into Qualys, including $1.8 million in capital expenditures and 38.9 million to repurchase 273,000 of our outstanding shares. As of the end of the quarter, we had 106.8 million remaining in our share repurchase program. With that, let's turn to guidance, starting with revenues. For the full year 2023, we expect revenues to be in the range of 554 million to 555 million, representing a growth rate of 13%. For the fourth quarter of 2023, we expect revenues to be in the range of 144.1 million to 145.1 million, representing a growth rate of 10 to 11%. With respect to margins, factoring in the better than expected profitability to date, we expect full year 2023 EBITDA margin in the mid 40s and free cash flow margin in the mid 30s with full year EPS in the range of 5.04 to 5.14 up from the prior range of 4.50 to 4.65. For the fourth quarter of 2023, we expect EPS in the range of 1.18 to 1.28. In Q4, we expect to spend 2 to 3 million in capital expenditures, implying approximately 9 to 10 million total for the full year. We remain confident in our differentiated technology and ability to deliver on our growth opportunity long term while investing to maximize shareholder value. With that, Sumedh and I would be happy to answer any of your questions.
Operator
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1 1 on your phone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Stand by as we compile the Q&A roster.
Qualys
One moment please for our first question.
Operator
And our first question will come from Mike Walkley of Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.
Mike Walkley
Great. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the strong profits. I guess with 54% of your customers now adopting CMDR, Can you just help us think about net dollar retention trends going forward? I know it's early, but maybe you can share how some of your customers are reacting to your newer solutions such as Context, XDR, and Total Cloud that could help drive net dollar in the future.
Chris
Thanks for that question. And as we talked about earlier, I think we're pretty excited about some of the things that we are releasing, especially with cloud, etc. Of course, the environment continues to to be challenging today. And so as our customers that we are working with, they look at a platform approach. They look at their current optimization of what they are buying from different vendors, from Qualys, We continue to have great conversations. We continue to see opportunities. We continue to be happy with how CSAM patch management are becoming part of the bookings and including new bookings and the opportunities that we see in the future, especially as everybody's moving into the cloud and the opportunities for our truly natively built cloud platform to be an area where customers will continue to work with us to deploy our solutions, to expand their VMDR offerings. So VMDR customers, as they move into the cloud with total cloud CNAP capabilities, get not only VMDR, but additional capabilities to really have one single pane of glass view for their entire cloud security. And this is the driving factor of many conversations that we are having now as they look forward to 2024 and looking into cloud security. And some of the early events that we are seeing is encouraging. And so I think this... the customers adopting the MDR and that we're pleased to see that continue to pick up and get to 54% and that of course gives us the ability to have our agents deployed in more environments and those agents being deployed does give the opportunity for us to do additional upsells on CSAM, batch management, EDR, etc., but also Now, with 31 million agents running in the public cloud environments, the opportunity for us to work with them on total cloud is something that we're excited about.
Mike Walkley
Great, thanks. Just a follow-up question, maybe on OPEX. Just with the new CRO, I know you paused as you revisited the go-to-market strategy. How should we think about you know with your strong margins maybe starting to invest in sales capacity um as we exit this year or or in the next year i guess another way i'm trying to ask balancing the macro backdrop with the opportunity to maybe add sales capacity you know with dino on board um we are looking at all our investment opportunities for the remaining
Blair
remainder of this year, as well as next year, we think that based on what we see today, our sales and marketing expense to be relatively in line in terms of the growth year over year in Q4 as in Q3. So you're looking at like 9%, 10% around that kind of range ending the year. And then for next year, we are going through the planning cycle right now to understand, you know, will we think that we should double down on investment and accelerate versus kind of put on hold. But with that said, given the underinvestment that we had this year, based on the ROI that we estimated, we do expect an acceleration in sales and marketing investments next year.
Mike Walkley
Great. Thank you very much.
Operator
Thank you.
Qualys
One moment please for our next question.
Operator
Our next question will come from the line of Matt Hedberg of RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Matt Hedberg
Hi, this is Anishtha from Matt Hedberg. Thanks for taking my questions here. Maybe just to start with, can you talk about your high-level thoughts on 2024 and what you think would be the building blocks there? And then could revenue growth potentially accelerate in 2024 Given easier comms and the investments you've been making over the past year.
Blair
Yeah, I think it's a little early for us right now. We are going through the planning cycle. I think taking a look at what we know today, Q4 is a huge quarter for us. So what we're trying to do is understand the current dynamics and what it'll translate to our Q4 bookings, and then we'll be able to share more color in 2024 in terms of where we think that we'll be able to land for revenue growth. But right now, what we see is if you take a look at our trajectory and the growth, we do see that even though the environment has stabilized, the market appears to be challenging for us. So with our net dollar expansion rate at 106%, We do see room where that could pick up a few percentage points in the coming quarters, but it's a little too early. Got it.
Matt Hedberg
And then can you talk about the federal vertical a little bit? I realize it's a small vertical for you, but it looks like you've been seeing traction with it over the past few quarters. So just given the federal year end, how did that vertical perform in the quarter?
Chris
Yeah, great question. We do have increasing focus on our federal side of the business. As you said, it's not a big part of our business today. What we're seeing is the federal agencies are also looking for a refresher, really looking for a new approach to managing their risk. They are having the same challenges that too many vulnerability findings coming their way. And so when they kind of look at the Polus platform and the ability for us to showcase the inventory, vulnerability management, risk management, and then remediation capabilities, those are really resonating well with them. And so as we recently got on a federal leader, we're getting through the process of getting out a FedRAMP High certification completed, which makes us one of the only FedRAMP High ready platforms of vulnerability and match management, we do see, you know, as we continue to make our investments in the federal going market, we do see good opportunity for us in the next couple of years really to accelerate the growth for our federal business from where we are today.
Qualys
Got it. Thank you. Thank you. And one moment, please, for our next question. The next question will come from Jonathan Ho of William Blair. Your line is open. Pardon me. Jonathan Ho, your line is open. If your phone is on mute, please unmute your line. If you're using a headset, please put on your headphones. Hello, Mr. Ho, your line is open. Can you hear me?
Operator
Yes, you are loud and clear.
spk06
Okay, sorry. Just in terms of your channel partner progress, can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing there and maybe what some of the lower hanging fruit can be just given the hiring of your new CRO?
Chris
Look, we started down this sort of investment about a year, a little bit over a year ago. taking a different approach to how we're working with partners. So we're pleased with the early feedback we're getting. You see some of the mix of our business also changing a little bit to the partner side. And I think we do see that there's a good amount of opportunity for us to invest and increase how we work with our partners. So right now, as we look at the low-hanging fruit in terms of better deal registration, better incumbency protection that we have provided is showing some of the early impact of partners building their trust with us and working with us on some of these deals that we are working on. But then as we have Dino come on board and through the rest of the year we look through what are the more specific opportunities for the short term with certain partners to work on investing with them so that we can get that benefit not only in the short term, but then also sort of continue our focus on the partner strategy for the longer term as well.
spk02
So this is definitely an area that Dino and I are very much in line with and looking forward to continuing our focus and investment on the partner side of the house.
spk06
Got it. And just as a follow up, I guess I'm a little bit confused because in the prepared remarks, you talked a little bit about, you know, indications that, you know, more and more customers are taking on a platform view of Qualys and, you know, sort of buying into the broader vision. But then we're seeing sort of the net retention shrink a little bit. So is this sort of customers are buying in, but because of budget constraints, you know, they're just sort of renewing what they have, you know, they, you know, sort of reducing assets. I'm just I'm just trying to understand sort of how those two data points align. Thank you.
Chris
Great question. And I think it continues to be challenging for our customers as well in terms of managing the spend and managing the security spend and optimizing that. And so today, we continue to be happy with our overall retention rate, which is healthy. And so the customers are really excited to continue to work with Qualys. And then there are definitely opportunities that we work with our customer in terms of maybe they want to optimize some of their spend on a certain area of the product and then bring on other quality products from a platform approach while not maybe significantly increasing their spend in this year, but creating opportunity for in the future when those budgets open up to buy additional licenses of additional new capabilities that we deploy with them in the current deployment that they have. And so in some cases, they are adding additional. In some cases, they are creating new opportunities for the newer products to be deployed right now in smaller quantities instead of maybe some of the existing products that they have. But the conversations are definitely more in the positive side of working towards bringing more quality solutions and then creating opportunities for us in the future as the budgets open up a little bit so that they can expand on those additional licenses as well.
Qualys
Great. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. And again, one moment please for our next question. Our next question will come from Brian Colley of Stevens. Your line is open.
Brian Colley
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you just talk about how the competitive environment and how win rates as well as pricing trended this quarter?
Chris
I don't think you saw much of a change from what you've seen in the last couple quarters. I think we definitely continue to see the similar players that we've always seen in the whole VM space. I think we see tremendous opportunity in the cloud security space where we are looking at and we talked a couple examples where we're displacing some cloud point solutions that are out there. So we see opportunities there as well. I think overall, You know, win rates roughly about stayed the same from the last quarter. So we see opportunity as customer budgets open up and our execution also continues to improve with Dino coming on board to be able to do better on that side as well. And I think we continue to see that similar discounting from competitors to try to get business. And that's where the opportunity for us to go back and instead of just driving the price down, bundle capabilities like cybersecurity asset management, patch management that our competitors don't have is again creating opportunities for us which is reflected in a way in the LTM, you know, 11% of overall bookings that already have that already have CSAM and batch management, but also the fact that the new business, the bookings that are coming from new business, the ATM bookings there, about 19% of that is coming from these additional capabilities. So we are, you know, being able to take advantage of the broader platform play in competitive and discounting situations so we can compete effectively.
Brian Colley
Got it. Thank you. And then, Jumi, maybe one for you. You know, you had talked about billings kind of staying in a similar range as you saw last quarter, and obviously you came in above that at 14% growth. I'm curious, you know, what areas kind of surprised you the most there, and then also how should we think about billings growth in the fourth quarter?
Blair
Yeah, for billings, it does have a tendency to fluctuate, and there are multiple different reasons why it might not exactly align with our bookings or business trajectory. But looking at it on an LTN basis, you're looking at it was 11% on an LTN basis growth last quarter, and it ticked up to 12%. And I think it fairly reflects what we're seeing in the market today in terms of our business. And for next quarter, we don't see it materially changing from that rate.
Brian Colley
Got it. Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. And one moment for our next question.
Qualys
The next question will come from Young Kim of Loop Capital Markets. Your line is open. Pardon me, Young Kim, your line is open. If your phone is on mute, please unmute your line. If you're using a headset, please put on your headphones. Young King, your line is open. You may proceed. One moment, please. I will go to the next question. Again, one moment, please, for our next question.
Operator
The next question will come from Rudy Kessinger of DA Davidson. Your line is open.
Rudy Kessinger
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. To me, I just want to go back and clarify. I heard your prepared remarks. You said free cash flow for the full year in the mid-30% range. I just want to make sure that's accurate. That would imply break-even cash flow to to negative 15 million cash flow in Q4. Did you mean mid-30s for Q4?
Blair
No, it's about mid to high 30s. So I'm expecting about only a few million in free cash flow for Q4. So you're looking at about like maybe 205 million range for the full year. And that's primarily due to deferral of the tax payments to Q4.
Rudy Kessinger
Okay. Got it. Okay. And then just trying to, I understand the puts and takes of your Q4 revenue guide. I mean, with the Q3 guide and prior four-year guide, you hadn't applied a Q4 revenue guide before. You beat revenue by about a million on the quarter. You saw current calculated billings reaccelerate a few points to 14%, and then you effectively lowered the Q4 implied revenue guide by about half a million. And so what drove the outperformance in Q3, and why isn't it reflected in a higher Q4 revenue guide?
Blair
Yeah, the outperformance in Q3, I mean, it's a small outperformance if you take a look at it from the bookings trajectory, because I think our bookings performance is more fairly reflected by the LTM current billing flow. So you're looking at 11% to 12%, and that was better than what we had expected from basically on the new, and that definitely helped with our current billings in terms of the 14% that we posted in Q3. With respect to revenue, it's not, that much of a decline if you take a look at the difference in terms of what was implied in Q4 versus the outperformance in Q3. And there's really nothing more to it than that.
Qualys
Okay. Got it. Thanks for taking my questions. Thank you. One moment please for our next question.
Operator
The next question will come from Joshua Tilton of Wolf Research. Your line is open.
Joshua Tilton
Hey, guys. Can you hear me? Yeah. Great. I apologize if somebody addressed this already. I'm kind of bouncing around on a few tonight. But I remember last quarter you kind of gave like some soft guardrails around what you thought 3Q current billings growth could be based off of what 2Q was. So I'm wondering if you can kind of give us some soft guardrails on what you think 4Q current billings could be based off the strong performance you saw in 3Q.
Blair
Yeah, we think that it's going to be more or less in line with Q3. So what we tend to look at is, I mean, current billings we understand is a proxy for bookings performance, and it tends to be monthly. So what you're looking at is as of Q2, LTM current billings growth was 11%. Q3 trended up a little bit higher than what we had expected, landing at 12%, and we expect it to be approximately that range ending the year in Q4. for the current billings growth for the full year to be around that 12% range.
Joshua Tilton
Sorry, just to confirm, you expect Q4 to land in a way that the LTM current billings growth is in the 12% range?
Blair
Right. So what that basically means is that Q4 around the same, like maybe 13 to 14% current billings growth for Q4.
Joshua Tilton
Okay, super helpful. And then my second question is kind of a follow-up to this, but based off of what you just said, I feel like I sort of already know the answer. It's been kind of a weird year. You know, deals have been delayed, sales cycles are elongated, scrutiny, whatever you want to call it. How do we think about the quarter's benefits from maybe some deals that slipped from Q1 and Q2? driving some of the strong performance we saw, or would you really characterize that 14% growth as true 3Q performance? Does that make sense?
Blair
Yes. So I think in current billings, what's really true from a business performance perspective, because billings is also impacted by the timing of invoicing, I would point to the LTM growth rate, and that fairly reflects it. So as of Q2, it was 11%, and Q3 was slightly better at 12%. We think that that barely reflects what we're seeing in the market today, and we don't see any material improvements for Q4. It will be a large quarter for us, but based on what we see today, we expect continued challenging environment, and we'll wait to see how that plays out to better understand what we think that we'll be able to achieve in 2024. Super helpful.
Joshua Tilton
Thank you so much, guys.
Operator
Thank you. And one moment for our next question.
Qualys
And again, we have Young Kim of Loop Capital Markets. Your line is open. Young Kim, your line is open. Again, if your phone is on mute, please unmute your line. Mr. Kim, your line is open. One moment, please, as we move on to our next question. One moment, please, for our next question.
Operator
The next question will come from the line of Brian Essex of J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.
Mike Walkley
Hey, this is Doug on for Brian. Thank you so much for taking my question. Maybe just one from me.
Qualys
Any details that you can give on net new logo growth in the quarter?
Blair
Net new growth, it did come in better than what we had expected, but it still remains to be challenging. So our customer count still is kind of flat. And so what we're trying to do is Instead of for the next year, it's to make sure that we leverage our channel partnership to focus on the new business growth.
Mike Walkley
Okay, great. Thank you so much.
Qualys
Thank you. One moment, please, for our next question. Our next question will come from Matt Saltzman of Morgan Stanley.
Operator
Your line is open.
spk09
Great. Thanks for taking the question. Sumedh, quick one for you. It's a bit of a philosophical one, but when you think about the cloud security and CNAP opportunity, there's a fair amount of debate among security practitioners around what's the best way to tackle the cloud security issue, whether it's agent-based, whether it's agentless. I'm just curious if you can talk a little bit about the benefits you see from the agent-based approach that Qualys leads with. Thanks.
Chris
Well, see, that's the beauty that we are not taking one or the other. Actually, that's the part of what we have released with our TotalCloud CNAP solution is this ability for us to do FlexScan, which actually allows customers to use either an agent-based or an agent-less approach. And so we don't get into this debate about what's better because I think if you look at the history of Qualys, we know cloud better than anybody given that we've actually been in the cloud for 20 years. And so we understand that really well. And we went from an agent-less scanning solution for many years to adding agent-based capabilities and not replacing the agentless scanning. And so today, if you're really being honest about what really is needed for security perspective, it is a combination of agent-based, wherever you want to get a lot more details, and then agentless, where it's an operational impact, where you want to reduce the operational impact in trading off by doing an agentless assessment. But with our Total Cloud Synapse solution, we give our customers the ability to pick whichever works the best for them. And firstly, the most important part for our customers is to understand that nobody's a cloud-only company. Everybody has cloud, they have some on-prem, they have office environments, they have laptops. So focus for everybody is how do I get a single unified view of cloud, non-cloud, everything together. And for that, today's cloud solutions really need to be truly cloud-native and truly organically developed. And so instead of going out and acquiring multiple different cloud solutions, and trying to stitch them together and calling it cloud native. What we are focused on is really expand what we have done for all these years in the cloud platform, our own cloud platform, and then expand that into a truly organically natively integrated solution that does both agent-based, agentless, snapshot, everything in a single platform so customers don't have to pick and choose and have this philosophical conversation every time.
Qualys
Great, thanks. That's super helpful. Thank you. One moment.
Operator
And I'm seeing no further questions in the queue. That will conclude today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect and have a pleasant day.
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